Pujo! and the Technicolor dreamcoat.

After all the abuse that's been heaped on Pujo! over the last 2 years, we decided to be nice to him for a change and give him a new paint job. The best way to describe the last paint job I did is "Epic Fail". Those of you who have been reading for awhile and following our exploits know that in trying to replicate the Peugeot Rally Team stripe scheme, I may have accidentally painted the car like T.C.'s helicopter from Magnum P.I.

As you can see, a new paint scheme has been desperately needed for quite some time. Unfortunately, we've been spending more time sorting out mechanical problems than decorative problems and we never seemed to have the time to paint before a race. This time we have everything almost done and we could no longer ignore "Magnum".
See what I mean? You can't ignore Magnum. Especially with those shorts. Yow.


Initial sanding and masking comlpete.


Prime time! That means it's 9pm and I'm missing my shows!


If this were a '69 Camaro, I'd be done!


Paint that funky Peugeot white, boy.


Scott has the blues. He's trying to fix my catastrophic paint run. Good luck Scott. When I f*** up, I do it properly.


Red backside. Like a baboon, no?


There, much better. As long as you're over 25 feet away.

Fun photos

No idea how we forgot to get this up on our blog. Jalopnik lists their all-time costumed favorites, and we made the list!? And here we were worried about being underthemed... something we're definitely improving upon if we make it to Thunderhill this year.

http://jalopnik.com/5317990/a-treasury-of-24-hours-of-lemons-team-costumes/gallery/

Sprite/Pujo! update

Been awhile since I last posted. It's not that I've forgotten, it's just that I don't want the blog to become like FaceBook.

Right now Sean is...
Clipping his fingernails.

Right now Sean is...
Enjoying the sound of an air conditioner.

Sean has sent you a quiz!
Do you like blue?

You have a friend request from someone you were happy to forget about from high school.

Bleah.

I'm just not cut out for FaceBook. I'd rather write nothing than let everyone know how much nothing is going on in my life at any given moment.

But I digress.

Now about the Sprite. No, it's not going to become a LeMons car. It's my dads car. My brothers and I gave it to him for his 80th birthday last November. And we've been trying to get it fixed ever since it's engine blew up a month ago. Sadly, rebuilding the engine is proving to be time and cost prohibitive. It's rebuildable, but just barely. It's really bad. Literally the worst engine I've ever seen that didn't have a rod sticking through the block. And yet it ran great until it... didn't. So, rather than spend a lot of the Summer trying to rebuild (my dad isn't getting any younger and the Northwest has limited good weather for driving an open car) we started looking for a good used or rebuilt replacement. It's taken a couple of weeks, but we found one. A rebuild, but never installed 948cc popped up in Oregon. The owner bought it with a couple of race engines and since it was rebuilt as a street engine he's never used it. I'm going down to pull the pan off it next Tuesday and if it looks good I'll bring it home and we'll drop it into the waiting engine bay. More on that as it developes.

For you Pujo! fans out there, no you haven't been forgotten (all 2 of you. Hi mom!). After the Sprite is done and I have a couple of weekend races out of the way in July and a vacation in early August, we'll be back working on Pujo!. There are some issues to fix. For one the gearbox is jammed in 3rd. Another is the electrical system. The alternator failed in Reno and we were running on battery for about half the race. Fortunately we brought a spare battery and kept charging and swapping. We have a blown shock. Not a really big deal, but rebuild kits are about $20 to do a pair, so we might as well fix it. Other than that and an oil change, Pujo! will be ready to race in November. The only really time consuming part of the whole project will be redecorating the car. It needs something more stylish. More bold. More artful.

More.... French.

Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty apes!

We started this venture as wee little Rhesus monkeys, not even worthy of shampoo testing. But through this adventure, blessed with moxy and opposable digits, we have matured into ApeRacers.

The T.V. was my baby-sitter.

It's been a couple of days since we painted the stripes on Pujo! To my surprise a song popped into my head as soon as I walked into Doug's shop the other night. It was the theme song to Magnum, P.I.. For about a half hour it was stuck in my head and I couldn't figure out why until I looked at the car again. In trying to make our piece of junk a little more flashy for the track, I'd unwittingly painted it like T.C.'s helicopter from Magnum. That proves I spent way too much time in front of the T.V. as a kid!




Here are some other concept paint jobs that we considered before settling on our final version...






My daughter, Shannon, didn't like any of these and suggested we paint it like this...

I liked it, but I didn't have the skill to paint it.

So you CAN polish a turd!

Here's some photo evidence to demonstrate...



We had some inspiration from a Peugeot 405 Rallye car.



Then we broke out the well aged cans of Krylon.



Ta-Da! Turd polished!

The French Solution to Plugging a Hole

Since Pujo! has such a fragile trunk, we want to keep any water from getting in and causing even more damage back there.